1. Field
The following description relates to over-the-air provisioning of virtual cards on a mobile device, such as a mobile communication terminal, with a non-Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC) type secure element.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the advent of advancing mobile technology, more features have been integrated into the mobile devices. From GPS applications to mobile office products, mobile device, such as a mobile communication terminal, has become a necessity for everyday needs. In order to further utilize mobile technology to better cater to consumer's daily requirements, attempts have been made to provide for a mobile financial management system to replace conventional physical wallets. Specifically, this mobile wallet functionality was sought to be realized through provisioning of card issuer's account information directly into a secure element (SE) of the mobile device equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) chipset. Provisioning may refer to a process of preparing and equipping an apparatus with information (e.g., financial information) to allow it to provide one or more services to its users. The SE may be a smart card chip capable of storing multiple applications, including of account specific information that may not be easily accessed by external parties. The model mobile wallet application may have the same composition as a conventional wallet, which may contain payment cards, member cards, transportation cards, and loyalty cards.
Mobile wallet functionality may be further enhanced by provisioning the user financial credential onto mobile devices equipped with Near Field Communication chipset (NFC enabled). Once the user financial credentials have been provisioned onto the NFC enabled is mobile device, the provisioned NFC enabled device may transfer information or make payments to another NFC compatible device by coming near within a few centimeters of one another without physically contacting each other. This type of technology is conventionally referred to as “contactless” technology and a payment made with this technology is referred to as “contactless” payment. Despite the numerous benefits that are available utilizing the described technology, there has been no practical solution to provision sensitive user information to the NFC enabled mobile devices.
One possible solution for provisioning mobile wallet cards is to perform the provisioning at a secure facility controlled by the mobile wallet card issuer. However, this solution may require users to bring their mobile device to the physical mobile wallet card issuer for provisioning. This process has to be repeated for every mobile wallet card the user seeks to provision at different card issuer facility, making the concept of utilizing mobile wallet application impractical.
In light of this limitation, a new system and method has been developed providing for over-the-air (OTA) provisioning. Rather than relying on provisioning at physical locations, a method for provisioning financial account information via OTA has been sought. Through technological advancement, OTA provisioning has been provided for mobile device with the SE types of UICC, Services Identity Module (SIM), Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) to (herein referred collectively as UICC) cards via industry standard Short Message Service Point to Point (SMS-PP) and Bearer Independent Protocol (BIP) protocols. However, while SMS-PP protocol and Bearer Independent Protocol BIP allow OTA provisioning for UICC cards and their equivalents, it does not allow for OTA provisioning of MicroSD's and Embedded SEs (i.e. non-UICC SEs), which may not support conventional Subscriber Identity Module Application is Toolkit (SAT)/Universal Subscriber Identity Module Application Toolkit (USAT)/Card Application Toolkit (CAT) framework. As such, any mobile device with SE types MicroSD, Embedded SE, or other non-UICC SE type that does not support SMS-PP or BIP protocol may not be provisioned OTA with the conventional technology.
FIG. 1 illustrates a system diagram of a conventional OTA provisioning process through SMS PP protocol. FIG. 2 is a corresponding flow diagram illustrating a conventional method for OTA provisioning to mobile device using SMS PP protocol. Specifically, the referenced figures will provide for OTA provisioning via SMS PP protocol.
Typically, before the request is made to provision a mobile device, it is assumed that that the MNO has already registered all of its information including OTA key information in step 201 in an offline batch process. Once MNO registers all of the necessary information, mobile device may be ready for provisioning.
To begin the provisioning process, a user makes a request to a financial institution 18 to provision a mobile wallet card, in step 202. Then, the financial institution 18 will process the request and send the request along with necessary identifiers, such as Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number (MSISDN) along with provisioning data to MNO OTA server 16 in step 203. MNO OTA Server 16 will then transmit the provisioning command to the mobile device 11 directly via SMS-PP protocol in step 204. MNO OTA Server 16 and MNO 19 may be owned by the same entity but illustrated as two different entities to show the different functions performed by the individual elements. More specifically, MNO 19 is shown only in step 201 to illustrate the pre-registration step that is performed by the MNO 19. Once registered, MNO OTA server primarily interacts with the mobile device 11 to provision the information provided by financial institution 18. Lastly, in step 205, mobile device 11 receives is the message and performs the provisioning process into its SE (e.g., USIM, SIM, UICC).